Q&A: Corp Dev Associate at FIG company

My experience has been that big corporations tend to move slowly internally. There was a lot of corporate bureaucracy on every project we got involved and the project team would be 25+ people large across corp. functions even in initial stages (don't get me started how big it got when a deal went into 2nd round).

Secondly, I felt like I was in an ivory tower looking at business units from an excel sheet mainly without much interaction with the actual revenue generators or an understanding on how the business/operations is run.

Another aspect I did not like was some of the faux pas I was told not to do e.g. not ranking the email address by rank/title when sending out a title.

Don't get me wrong, it was a great learning experience to get my feet wet straight out of college but based on where I am right now in my career, I would rather not return to a full-on corporate environment.

Smaller firm also has its problems (lack of resources at times, had to do random stuff such as risk analysis, FP&A, Operational roadmaps etc. in the early years). However, the big advantage is that I was able to learn the business in-and-out as much as I can and have a much deeper understanding on how the industry actually operates.